XPS 13 / Ubuntu 15.04 Freezes with Caps Lock Blnking

Hi,

You seem to be saying that you have not patched the wifi driver. This was key for me. These kernel panics stopped for me when I patched the Broadcom wifi driver (as described here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bcmwl/+bug/1415880 )

I went from having one or two kernel panics a day to none since I did the patch (about one week). I also have the usually recommended modules blacklisted (i.e. adding blacklist mei, blacklist mei_me to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf.)

I have also set the XPS13 to do nothing on closing of the lid -- I just suspend via a press of the power button. However, I set this up before I patched the wife drivers (as I was mostly getting the panics when I closed the lid to suspend), and have not tried setting the lid close back to its normal suspend function...everything might be fine t now but I just have got into the habit of suspending via the power switch.

Good luck.

What worked the best for me to get rid of kernel panics was to swap out the Broadcom card with an Intel 7260NGW. I've only had two kernel panics since I got the machine, both times happened in the short window where I had the Broadcom card installed. I haven't had a single panic with Intel wireless cards installed. Plus, my Bluetooth now works.

I have patched the broadcom driver as described above, I have blacklisted mei and mei_me, I still suspend by closing the lid, and I have had no more kernel panics since patching the driver.

I also ended up replacing the Broadcom card with the Intel 7265, zero kernel panics since. I understand I could have patched the driver, but now I have a stable machine from the get go no matter which distro I choose to run..

I have this problem with a brand new XPS15 - it's only happening on resume from sleep and only on a handful of occasions. I get a black screen with the cursor and a blinking caps lock.  So far I've just hard rebooted to get past it. I'm running Kubuntu 15.04.

Just to add myself into the statistic, I also get kernel panics while connecting to Wifi or changing network. (At work I'm on ethernet, so it doesn't happen very often.) I also have a XPS13 (but custom configuration), BIOS version A05, running Linux Mint 17.2 (=Ubuntu 14.04) with kernel 3.19.0-22.

It's really touching thinking about all of these people still trying to get their dell xps working. 

I like the idea of statistics, makes me want to build a spreadsheet and share it, make it as public as possible, because dell should be ashamed. 

I think everybody that has these issues should send the xps back, A06 has been promised a long time ago and is not out, previous versions didn't fix much. 

I saved myself from the xps agony by spilling water on it, perhaps a freudian lapsus. 

I'm not sure about what exactly is going to be in the A06 BIOS for this system, but the only change I've seen mentioned is one to tweak some timing parameters more so that key repeats a few people are seeing go away. But again, I have no control over what ends up in our BIOS updates, so we'll only know for sure when the next update is released. At no point though has Dell indicated that a new BIOS will fix these kernel panics. At no point was a new BIOS promised by a certain date. 

The kernel panics are related to the Broadcom wireless driver. We have worked with Canonical and Broadcom on these driver issues and as you'll see in the comments above, those who have used these patches have seen the kernel panics disappear.

While we in no way restrict customers from running other Linux distributions and have been willing to help those customers on a best effort basis, I hope everyone can understand that it is not possible for us to collaborate with Canonical for bugs in other distributions.

Same issue, brand new XPS 13 just out of the box today.  It froze when installing install bcmwl-kernel-source, but I'm not sure if that had anything to do with the freeze as it happened before too.  I had to force the power off and now I'm stuck with a grub rescue terminal at boot.  Broadcom and Linux have always had issues so I'm wondering why Dell went with them for their sole laptop designed to work with Linux.

Remember, the DE is not designed for Linux.  It is supported by a small team of guys who take the Windows designed XPS 13 and try and get Linux to run on it by writing drivers and patches and custom software (and maybe even BIOS level tweaks?).

So why Dell went with them?  Probably for business reasons pertaining to the primary target consumer and with no consideration for Linux...not that I mean to suggest they should pay attention to Linux until it becomes a sizeable revenue generator/market for them.

We can always hope though :)

I'm going to call BS on that comment about Linux; if you search around, you'll find plenty of people complaining about this issue (and other, similar freezes) with the factory-supplied Windows installation.

Here it is, three years later, and I have the same problem on a brand-new 9380.  It's  quality control at Dell.  Unfortunately, as of now the commonly reported fix is to keep sending the laptops back to Dell until you eventually get one that doesn't freeze up.

I'm pretty close to giving up on Dell and just installing Linux on a Macbook.  It makes me more sad than angry that Dell can't build machines as reliable as Macs (which is already a low bar).